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EULOGY 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN 



DAVID S. CODDINGTON 



DELIVERED IN THE 



CITADEL SQUARE CHURCH, CHARLESTON, S. C, 



M:ay 6tli, 1865, 



AT THE REQUEST OF THE OFFICERS AND SOLDIERS IN THE 
NORTHERN DISTRICT, DEPARTMENT OF THE SOUTH. 




Die i,^ itart yet i&iJtahfth. 



NEW YORK: 
BAKER & GODWIN, PRINTERS, 

PEINTING-HOUSE SQUARE. 
1865. 



Headquarters Xorthern District, \ 
Department of the South, ;- 

Charleston, 8. C, April 20, 1S65. ) 
Hon. D. S. Coddington, — 

Di'ar Sir: Oa behalf of the officers ami soldiers of this district, who desire 
to express, in some deliberate form, the deep e^rief with which the loss of their 
beloved President has filled their hearts, we respectfully invite you to deliver 
an Eulogy upon the deceased, at such time and place as will bust suit your con- 
venience. 

We are, sir, very respectfully. 

Your obedient servants, 
(Signed) JOHN P. HATCH, 

Brigadier General Volunteers. 
(Signed) WM. GURNEY, 

CoL Vnth iV". Y. Vols , Commanding C'dii of Charlcdon. 
(Signed) JAMES C. BEECHER, " 

Col. S5th U. S. C. T., Conimindlncj N. City District. 
(Signed) EDWARD H. LITTLE, 

Maj. 121 th K Y. Vols., Commanding S. Citg District. 



CHARLii-.sro\, S. C, May 1, 1865. 
To General John P. Hatch, 

Commanding Northern District, Dejxirtinen' of the South ; 
Colonel William Gurnev, 

Ccmmandlng Post of Charleston, <£•<•., civ. ; 
Gentlemen: Your letter of the 20th of April, inviting me, on behalf of tha 
officers and soldiers of the Northern District of the Department of the South, 
to deliver an eulogy upon our lamented Chief Magistrate, Abraham Lincoln, 
has been received. 

I know of no subject upon wliich human intelligence can be more justly ani 
appropriately exercised than on portraying the virtues of that eminent victim 
of crime and venom. 

I propose to carry out your wishes on Saturday', tlie 0th of May, as the ear- 
liest hour which my engagements will permit. 

I have the honor to be, gentlemen. 

Your very obedient servant, 

DAVID S. CODDINGTOX. 



EULOGY. 



Soldiers ! who have saved the national life, why do I 
stand here to-day the orator of desolation and death ? Why 
have ye half-masted that flag which now waves with new 
meaning over onr whole America ? 

Your arms are reversed, and yet there are no reverses ; 
your shields are craped in gloom, and yet the prospect is clear 
and bright before us ; no one dares to doubt your sublime 
courage and heroic devotion, and yet you shrink here to-day, 
unnerved and helpless, before the majesty of this bereave- 
ment. 

Alas ! our national deliverer has lallen at the very gates of 
the national deliverance, lie who brought down the great 
conspiracy to the dust is himself but dust. lie at whose beck 
a million of armed men moved upon the foe, had not one arm 
to stay the cowardly trigger that swept him from the earth. 

For four years crime and science sent forth their bulleted 
thousands to crush or capture that life which a single hnger 
has reached and rended. Why could not the genius of disap- 
pointment capitulate gracefully ? Why, when it had lost its 
cause, did it not preserve its self-respect, and so descend to a 
decent instead of a dastardly grave ? Xot that we would hold 
an entire community responsible for prompting this deed, yet 
the teachings of its leaders, the calumnies daily and hourly 
heaped on that head toiling only for the public weal, acting 
on a weak and insane temperament, produced their natural 
fruits in this culminating crime. The purity of our Republi- 
can faith, the golden stream of our returning prosperity, has 



been stirred and stained for the first time Avitli the murdered 
life-blood of our first Citizen. 

Just as we were sitting down to our second Union wedding 
feast, a skeleton stalks in upon the banquet. 

Just as we had reached that bend in the river of Retribu- 
tion, tliat angle of anxiety, where the implements of adjust- 
ment were succeeding the elements of destruction ; just as 
the blood of contending armies was drying up and healing up 
on those silent and deserted battle-fields from which the South 
was limping away crushed and helpless, from whence the 
North was stalking forth strong and magnanimous, the de- 
mon of assassination soars to the very pinnacle of our triumph, 
treads the sacred summit of our civil system, enters with its 
grave venom the theatre of social recreation, where sits our 
great actor on the theatre of events ; with stealthy step and 
ghastly cheek it leans over into the charmed circle amidst which 
power had forgotten everything but humor and friendship; 
its arm lifts — and our great and good friend vanishes forever. 
The chair of state sinks into the bier of death, on which lies 
the cold and clammy clod that was once the warm and use- 
ful life- of Abraham Lincoln. Oh! who could have the 
heart to stop the beating of such a heart, whose every throb 
was for the glory and unity of our whole America ? "What 
brain could plan the dasliing out of such a brain that so 
thoughtfully, so deeply, for years, had been planning our re- 
demption ? ]^o quarter for him who never drew a drop of 
blood beyond the lines of war ! No hope, no help for him 
who spared guilty thousands ! On that day, all the pride of 
power, all the glory of victory, all the sense of superiority 
over foe and faction vanished. We heard not the tramp of 
our irresistible hosts, we saw not the glittering spears of our 
successful heroes as they moved in majesty over rebellion's 
prostrate and punished hordes, we saw nothing through our 
falling tears — nothing but a breathless martyr and an empty 
chair. Thousands had lallen to help victory ; one, one death 
only could mar it, and that one nursed, cheered, led us up the 
mountain of our trial to leave us lonely and weeping at the 
peak. 



Did the shallow soul who took this life, imagine that he 
could obstruct the current of Abraii^vm Lincoln's cause by 
choking it up with Abeaham Lincoln's corpse ? Was he so 
ignorant of his victim's past as not to know that he who was 
to be injured was of all souls the most ready to forgive in- 
juries ? The South, which was to have been avenged by his 
death, was sure of more mercy, more helj) m their helpless- 
ness from this doomed man, than any unknown succeeding 
chief whom the exasperation of the North might precipitate 
in judgment upon the culprits. And even if the card sent by 
the assassin to the Vice-President had brouo-ht him within 
range of his shot, had the Speaker of the House, the President 
pro tem. of the Senate, the heads of departments all in their 
turn vanished from the official helm, there would have been 
so much merit to deplore, so many funerals to attend, but 
nothing else to miss or bury. Xo revolution to announce, no 
system to be swept away, whose roots are not in Washington, 
but in the hearts and habits of American citizenship. The 
constitution of the LTnited States has worked its way into the 
constitution of every individual life. What is grounded in 
human nature, can only be eradicated by human nature. The 
habit and the influence of this republican system is so sure 
and so constant that the transition from one incumbent of 
office to another, is too natural, too necessary, to be disturbed 
by any violent displacement. For every Lincoln dead, there -p* 
is a Lincoln to follow, without jar or disconcertion, beyond ' 
the sentiment and gossip of the hour. A Lincoln, too, insist- 
ing on the same righteous conflict, the same redeeming policy ; 
a policy reached and shaped thoughtfully, gradually, at first 
reluctantly, feeling its way timidly through the slow relaxing 
labyrinth of popular approval, until widely, almost unani- 
mously, not by the freak or fanaticism of a man, nor in the 
hour of sm*e and exultant conquest, but proclaimed in suffer- 
ing and in doubt, as the majestic resolve, the poHtical and 
moral necessity, the deep self-convinced, self-defensive experi- 
ence of a people determined not to come out of this fearful 
tempest with a right half yielded, a wrong half mended, and 
so a community wholly again insecure and vulnerable. 



When a government depends upon an intelligent head, 
rnling an ignorant mass, the death of the one may be the up- 
heaval of the other ; but when the Chief of the State is but 
the type and the epitome of the average community, that 
whole community must die before the system perishes. Like 
most of the blunderers who have attempted to reason on the 
results of om* war, the assassin underrated the republican sys- 
tem in educating the republican character. Calumny has 
erred more than it has benefited by reading history ; because 
Home split and Europe usually emerges from her great con- 
vulsions with old political lines obliterated, and a new con- 
struction of her civil relations, the great American Kepublic 
must degenerate into the same disruptions and divisions — for- 
getting that universal suflrage and universal knowledge were 
arches of salvation upon which no other rej^ublic had ever 
rested. A people who liave the intelligence to see the right 
and the implement to secure it, are not born to meet the fate 
of nations who pass from commotion to commotion, with no 
interest and no voice in the result, because wdth no means to 
guide or influence it. " The great republic is gone," says the 
wise European philosophy of 1861. "Years of war, four or 
five republics, and then universal monarchy," exclaims the 
Count DeMorny. After the first six months, England was to 
interfere ; then came another flash of prophecy ; the military 
was to crush the civil power, a new Napoleon was to drive 
both houses of Congress out of the windows of the Capitol. 

Thiers' French Revolution and Headley's Najpoleon and 
his Marshals filled the weaker intelligence with these night- 
mares, as if soldiers, growing up and blooming all over with 
the blessings of such a government, possess the temptations to 
lawlessness of the French soldier, who knew nothing of the 
civil life of the past but by its oppressions ; and who had ac- 
quired no discipline or experience of years to shape or steady 
whatever better policy he might think he was contending for. 
Then came the plausiljle financial prophecy — that the national 
purse could not stand the expense of the national safety — the 
difiiculty was too vast, the outlay too enormous. N^o other 
people had ever met such a strain upon its resources without 



bankruptcy. As if any other people ever possessed such 
boundless resources to draw from, such floods of emiirration. 
such freedom from debt, such vast undeveloped treasure from 
ocean to ocean, such awakened industry, and such universal 
enterprise, which no nation in any hour of civil peace or civil 
commotion could call upon to prop up its princes or its prin- 
ciples. 

And now comes this most foul, fatal and depraved prophet, 
who, more cruelly and terribly personal in the application of 
his theory, imagines that if he can only strike down some of 
the higher oflicers of the government, the confusion, the per- 
turbation, the embarrassment that succeeds the blow may 
topple down the principle and the structure of the government 
itself ; and so his dear South, lying helpless at the far end of 
the plank, suddenly, by the weight of the fall, is lifted again 
to rise and rule by anarchy if not by victory. Never before 
has this stealthy state corrector — born of Mexican confusion 
and European oppression— aimed its ghastly reform at America's 
beneficent republicanism. The spirit of assassination is not 
a reasoning spirit ; if it had the mental energy to think, the 
agitation of ideas would purify it. It is a senseless, nerveless, 
mindless monster ! too weak to argue, and too timid to 
fight its victim; so it conceives its blow in meanness, and 
strikes in darkness. Every assassin is a morbid egotist, 
who, brooding on one idea, whether of revenge or reform, 
reduces to a selfish personality the cause of his difterences. 
Great minds take their chances with great principles. If they 
fail, the great man is appeased by the consciousness of right 
or the martyrdom of failure. The little mind, with no vision 
to comprehend either, substitutes nervous excitement lor men- 
tal contemplation ; and so, from love of notoriety or hatred of 
those who difier with, or surpass him, becomes an assassin. 
Calhoun could stab a nation with his logic, but how his nature 
would have recoiled at such an enforcement. In the whole 
history of assassination no striking man ever strikes the blow; 
the obscure Brutus and his accomplices flow down to us only 
on Csesar's blood. Eichard the Third threw on degraded roy- 
alty no brighter gleam than flashed from his perpetually 



8 



descending blade. Ravillac, wlio murdered Henry of France, 
was a low, irresponsible fanatic. The mm-derer of tbe Due de 
Berri, in depriving France of an amiable sovereign, blasted 
more on that day, than he had ever benefited in all his days. 
Russia's Peter and Russia's Paul and England's Perceval, all 
fell by men who never lifted themselves by word or deed 
above the little light that guided them to another's heart. 
And now, to-day, America's Lincoln comes down from a 
height loftier than his office, torn from the embrace of two 
millions of uplifting votes by the blow of a second-rate member 
of a second-class profession. The people who turned their 
backs on his acting have had to face his crime. He who knew 
nothing of government has succeeded in embarrassing it. He 
who spit upon the flag has half-masted it from Maine to Cal- 
ifornia. The player who could not secure the attention of a 
single house has shook a continent and startled a century. 

Yet when we remember how every life at all times is at 
the mercy of whatever insignificance or malignity chooses to 
assail it, we should thank the assassin for sparing Abkaham 
Lincoln to us so long. A life that has passed through so 
many phases of public sentiment, so many important and mo- 
mentous public actions, that life needed to be spared if it 
would be tested as the representative of the peculiar perils and 
novel trials of the American people — this life whose first ofii- 
cial mission was to prove the right of the people to change 
their past peaceably in the orbit of the constitution ; to reno- 
vate the old routine, to vindicate a new policy, to raise up and 
warm up more earnest men in the channels of public communi- 
cation, to face anger without fearing or provoking it, to rebuke 
without wronging a community who had nothing to fear be- 
cause no one to injure them. Let us thank the assassin for 
sparing him in that trembling interval between the ballot and 
the oath, between the 6th of November, 1860, and the 4tli of 
March, 1861, when the elect of the people was permitted to 
take the people's chair before it was wrenched from him by 
the people's foe. Let us be grateful to the forbearing fiend 
for withholding his hand during that long range of eighteen 
months of mere defensive peace-beseeching war, when the 



innocent purposes of tlie President's election were so fullj 
proved by the pertinacity with which he refused to disturb 
slavery. When that faithful hand, now cold in death, held on 
the rocking and reeling institution, through all the crimson 
sleet and blindino; mist and fire of those murderous lesions, 
and the lurid blaze from those incendiary ships which were 
shooting and burning out of the heart of the North all the 
forbearance which self-defense dictates to either policy or hu- 
manity. 

Let us thank the wretch, too, for that further delay when 
the hour came for changing the government policy without 
changing its sense of duty ; when the foe is to be punished 
more efi'ectually by withholding the element that encourages 
his crime ; when, having spared to the enemy more than he 
deserved, he could now concede to his friends all they asked ; 
could help the fallen and the favored race, help the cause, the 
flag and the age, by one word, and that word. Emancipation. 
It was something to be permitted to pronounce it, to shut up a 
crime by opening our mouth, to break a chain as well as a 
conspiracy, to shoot this redeeming ray in the face of the 
thousands who died to stifle it, to throw such a light on this 
nation as no sun of genius or glory had ever shot along our 
American sky. 

And now, after all the toil, the anguish, the doubt, the 
inexperience, the faith and the courage of four years of con- 
scientious labor in unparalleled fields of statesmanship, it was 
something, too, to be permitted to go, with all his works, his 
fears and hopes, to the ballot-box, and from out its deep tones 
to hear that sweetest music in the ear of all candidacy, " Go 
forth, thou good and faithful servant, to a new lease of labor 
and glory." We thank our stars that this star was not quenched 
until the darkness which brooded over us had been scattered 
forever, crime punished, freedom safe, and the nation para- 
mount. These were the aims of his policy and are the results 
of his efibrts, and no bullet stepped between them and the 
crowning consummation of his life. They conclude his history, 
they round his eulogy, and they must crown his immortality. 
The scholar cannot read his annals and doubt that he was 



10 



equal to the events whicli lie administered, or that the events 
themselves were equaled by anything American since the 
advent of Washington. 

If we look closely into the history of preceding adminis- 
trations, we see how obviously connected was their line of 
policy growing out of the events that preceded them ; how, in 
the unresisted exercise of its functions, the executive office is 
but comparatively plain sailing, despite of errors, and wrang- 
lings, and threats, which an appointment may modify, a mes- 
sage iniluence, or a veto arrest. 

The nulliiication of South Carolina in 1833 never disturbed 
even a sheet of paper in the War Office or State Department. 
Most of our constitutional disputes, heretofore, have pointed 
to an increase or decrease in the powers to be exercised under 
that instrument ; never to an extinction of its functions over 
any State or section. Since Shay's very trivial rebellion, not 
a pistol had been snapped in the face of the grand old charter. 
No one administration since the adoption of the constitu- 
tion has been confronted with any graver question than the 
charter of a bank, the reduction of a tariff, the status of a 
territory, the negotiation of a treaty, or the admission of a 
State, out of which logical convulsions often have arisen, but 
which the good sense of the people or the government have 
invariably adjusted. Mr. Lincoln's administration was the 
most trying, because it found itself not with the measures of 
government disputed, but its very existence denied. With 
the oath over him to administer for all the States, he found 
State after State renouncing a jurisdiction he dare not release 
and could not control. In being peremptorily called on to 
accept the secession of States, he was invited to arrogate 
powers not granted to him in the instrument he was bound to 
support. Wasliington's term of office was a period of serious 
trial and anxiety to the friends of republican government. 
Nothing less than the influence of such a hero could have 
secured the successful adoption of a constitution with which 
so many wise men differed. 

To secure a public opinion that would acquiesce in its 
jurisdiction, to reconcile the antagonism of leaders who 



11 



distrusted each otlier^s motives, and differed in tlieir construc- 
tion of tlie instrument tliey were aiding to administer, to 
substitute personal character and j^ersonal respect for tradition 
and experience, required a force of Mill, a delicacy of tact, an 
elevation of character, a superior contidence in the man wliich 
only such a hero could inspire. Popular intelli<>;ence in the 
time of our fathers would never have accepted this constitu- 
tion from a con\'iction of its benefits. One party, fresh from 
the memory of British injustice, were for construing away all 
constraint on their actions ; the other, more thoughtful, and 
fearful of the caprices of the multitude, insisted on approxi- 
mating to the conservatism of monarchy. Washington, calmer 
and clearer than either, admonished them of both extremes, 
strenuously administering the government in a spirit of moder- 
ation and harmony that permanently secured us the beautiful 
system under which we have lived and prospered. The ad- 
ministration of John Adams involved no more important 
question than the necessity of relieving the nation of a Chief 
who had no faith in popular government. lie was merely an 
eloquent, defiant electoral accident, a sort of intellectual isth- 
mus between the harmonious grandeur of Washington and 
the great popular leadership of Thomas Jefferson. The pres- 
idency of Mr. Jetferson originated that democratic policy 
which for fifty years powerfully influenced the nation, and 
settled on a more comprehensive basis the influence of the 
people in public affairs — the grave of Federalism and the 
nursery of a new political organization, which, under different 
names, has preserved its distinctive national disorganizing fea- 
tures, ever since. AVho now had the keener vision, Hamilton 
or Jefferson ? In that storm of contending statesmansliip, 
which almost shook the great chief from his chair, was it not 
Hamilton who prophesied that the Federal Government had 
most to fear from the encroachments of the States, and was 
it not Jefferson who, in his dread of central power, encouraged 
under the captivating and popular terms of " States Rights," 
" Federal Usurpation," all those little local laxitudes whose 
continuous buzz has so impeded for fifty years the music of 
the Union, and at last, through ambition and cunning, and 



12 



the slow but sure unloosening of national ties by the in- 
tellectual training of the Southern young American in this 
plausible but perilous political school, brought us to this 
doubly perilous brink. Our real destiny, both political and 
geographical, begins with this administration. To it we are 
indebted for all that portion of our possessions included in the 
States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, and the Territories of 
Nebraska and Washington. It laid the basis of our future 
statesmanship, and with it many of our subsequent trials and 
dangers. James Madison succeeded to the legacy of English 
difficulties bequeathed to him by the preceding rule. Though 
a statesman of profound talents and amiable virtues, no man 
was ever more abused for timidity and inconsistency. One of 
the principal framers of the Constitution, he felt too deeply 
the responsibility that authorship involved not to act cautiously 
in any matter affecting its security. The issues presented 
during his administration — war with England and the asser- 
tion of our freedom on the sea as well as on the land — were 
of a nature rather to unite than divide the nation. It was in 
his time that the famous Hartford Convention met — the body 
to which Southern Secessionists proudly pointed as a proof 
that the Northern States had contemplated resorting to seces- 
si(jn as Avell as themselves. Unfortunately for the argument, 
the Convention, which peaceably assembled, as peaceably dis- 
solved, without resolving to raise even a linger against their 
best friend. If the North ever talk rebellion, they talk on till 
they talk themselves back to a more dutiful allegiance. In 
the administration of James Monroe, which is called by histo- 
rians the era of good feeling, occurs the iirst warning of that 
terrible rending which slavery had in store f jr us. Yet the 
storm of the Missouri Compromise was quelled by a healthier 
public feeling than felled us. The succeeding President, John 
Quincy Adams, seated in the trough of the sea, between the 
wave of the Missouri difficulty and the billow of Nullification, 
moves on an easy swell to peace and oblivion. Then we come 
to the iron days of our inflexible Jacksc»n, a soldier by feeling 
and profession, and no fiercer war on his hands than to limit 
the Indian in a swamp, silence France with a demand for in- 



13 



demnity, South Carolina with a threat, and the great Bank 
with a veto. The succeeding regime is but an elongation of 
this master influence, memorable for the secession of gold and 
silver from the currency, and a war of words over the burning 
Caroline as it plunged down the awful abyss of Niagara. With 
the advent of Tylerism, comes the second installment of Abra- 
ham Lincoln's future trials, in the annexation of Texas ; then 
the election of Polk, with the sweeping dowai of the great and 
good men of both political parties ; the war with Mexico ; the 
coming in of golden lands, and the going out of the golden 
leaders who had kept up the health, the vigor and the integrity 
of the national sentiment. Later still, the Fillmore Administra- 
tion advances with the Compromise of 1850 — the last briefly 
successful struggle against the progressing arrogants of the 
slave power, when the dying giants of our land threw the 
weight of their names and nerves into the death struggle for 
peace and justice, expiring at the very threshold of their labors 
and leaving a helpless nation to drift on towards blinding 
darkness and blood. 

With the Pierce Administration arrives the era of little 
men and great conspirators, of harmony disturbed and com- 
pacts broken, of fresh graves opened and jewels robbed from 
our illustrious dead. 

In this administration the Republican party was born — in 
this administration was cut the timber from that Black Forest 
which was to kindle our recent unholy conflagration ; and tlius 
these master mischief-makers pile high the burden under M-liich 
the later Lincoln is to stagger. Soon the banner-blunderer, 
Buchanan, breaks on the lowering sky ; around him gather all 
the ghastly gamesters for empire, who read their doom in the 
threatening minorities soon to rise to chastising majorities 
against their sacreligious plottings. 

Here was woven the cotton shroud in which we have laid 
the dead South of the past — here was born in the Convention 
and vote of 1860 that pillar of fire for our night, that Abra- 
ham Lincoln whom this day we mourn and bless. This son 
of the prairie has found a high mountain range on which to 



14 



rest Ills great and good deeds. "We all remember the contest 
of 1860. In that crash of parties conscientious citizens hardly 
knew under which fragment to retreat with their bewildered 
opinions ; whether to go rail-splitting at Chicago or hair- 
splitting at Charleston ; whether to suffer respectable extinction 
with Bell and Everett, or to be frantically organized under the 
Southern Cross with Breckinridge and Lane. 

The storm rose, the sun darkened, the eai*th reeled ; on 
those heaving waves walked the trembling fortmies of Amer- 
ica, demanding to be reassured by the exercise of a warmer 
fellowship and a more comprehensive patriotism. The Repub- 
lican convention, too full of fear for favoritism, drops the 
giant of the Empire State and applies a more soothing seda- 
tive to the nervous commonwealth. Abraham Lincoln, 
though untried, was also uncursed ; though unknown, for that 
very reason he could not be unpopular. And now who is this 
man they have caught up in a despairing tempest and lashed 
fast to this unsteady wheel ? One indifferent Congressional 
term, one unsuccessful Senatorial contest are all the political 
capital he can drop into that anxious ballot-box. Yet they 
knew the stout character looming behind that lean reputation. 
They knew how much power a citizen may exhibit without 
the official exercise of power. How the open life of the press, 
the stump, and the tribune keep our American citizenship in 
constant communication with the men and the statesmanship 
of the times. LIow the active sympatliies of the observing in- 
tellectual man broaden and deepen the range of his vision, and 
silently accumulate for him a fund of civil helpfulness always 
valuable and always liable to be called upon in great political 
emergencies. Born in Kentucky, a Southern State, reared in 
Illinois, a Northern State, he possessed just that graft which 
quickening with neither extreme would rule both in harmony. 
The sympathy of the South in feeling, the energy of the North 
in action, a pure life, a tested intellect, a varied experience 
identified with a new and growing community, who had 
earned by numbere, by patience, by population and power, a 
Presidential candidate ; proved in general fidelity to party 
principles, yet unskilled in all partisan tactics and all vulgar 



15 



partisan scliemings ; with none of those weaknesses so common 
to the most extraordinary men, without Webster's convivial 
excess, or Cicero's vanity, or Bacon's love of money, this spot- 
less spirit rides the tempest, grinding no ax, but rebellion, to 
powder, and exhibiting no weakness but the lack of instant 
power to accomplish it. Where in the long line of our admin- 
istrators will you find more real dignity of character witli less 
assumption of it? Wliile other Presidents economize their 
strength with official reserve and occasional seclusion from those 
incessant personal inter\^ews which wear out the Presidential 
energies quite as much as more prominent exertion, Mr. 
Lincoln's sweep of good nature blew down all the fences 
around his position, and so left him out in common where the 
whole herd felt at liberty to browse. He M^as the first President 
who had time to see and hear every one. In civil war he has 
been civil to all. Blood never heated his blood. Place never 
made him forget his place. Thoughtful, studious, abstemious, 
industrious, the man of the people. Elected for all, with an ear 
for all, at home always in, his hand always out, ten chances to 
one if you or I go to the White House with a new invention 
to cradle wheat, a telegram from Gen. Grant's last battle does 
not surprise him with the instrument in his hand testing its 
merits in front of the White House. Tliis is the democracy of 
manners linked to the democracy of principles. Sympathy for 
man which place cannot displace, and which springs only from 
the noblest natm-es, tested by the trials of the loftiest station. 
The war has produced nothing more remarkable than the 
growtli of this character on the cause and the age. Our ear- 
lier Chiefs received the Presidency as the crowning official 
consummation of the people's gratitude for great and decisive 
seiwices in their behalf. The later Presidents, from Polk to 
Buchanan, were men of moderate ability and of indifierent 
usefulness. Lucky creatures of availability, for party favors 
they performed a party's behests, imparting nothing to high 
station, but a warning against the principle that placed them 
there. Abraham Lincoln, born of the same prhiciple of 
availability, the nominee and the elect of a mere party, the 
sins of that party to embarrass his administration of the cares 



16 



and troubles of the country, an unknown man grappling with 
and groping through unknown dangers, many trembled for the 
vote they had given when they saw the huge black cloud 
charged with that extraordinary thunder lowering down on 
that seemingly ordinary creation of partisan manoeuvreing. 
Some believed at first that the people had elected a joke to 
administer a calamity ; that we had merely called on an awk- 
ward undertaker to lay out the cold remains of American 
liberty, so gracelessly did he seem to shuffle up to the temple 
of fame. Every man who found the President diifering with 
his little way of settling our troubles, was sure we must go to 
ruin with such an ignorant pilot. Steadily and surely this 
perplexed chief toiled on through this mountain of misrepre- 
sentation ; ever the result of capacity not yet proved, of plans 
not yet matured, of results not yet concluded, and a country 
still to be saved. How often, on winter nights. Heaven's 
borealian light has been mistaken for some distant barn-yard 
conflagration ; how long, on our winter nights, we were in 
doubt whether om- light upon a hill w^as but a rubbish blaze, to 
go out with the blast, or the sun that was to pierce the cloud 
and light us to redemption. Never had great power been 
wielded with such utter absence of egotism and self-sufficienc}^ 
Almost every administration has been a paraphrase of mon- 
arcliical reserve in its communication and intercourse with the 
people. Now, in a moment of the greatest peril, when trouble 
provoked and provided for the power of a despot, Abkaham 
Lincoln used authority with the sympathy of a friend, con- 
fronting crime in an odd and artless way, that pursued it with 
the restlessness of a fiend and punished it with the gentleness 
of a father. With what concise and plaintive music in his an- 
nual messages and occasional addresses he chants the misereres 
of our struggle, a model of new and sympathizing eloquence 
in statesmanship. 

How anxiously and readily he turns to any source, how- 
ever irresponsible, for any clue, however insignificant, that 
may lead to peace. How earnestly, at Niagara Falls, he 
plunges into the foaming question with " whomsoever it may 
concern," as to the terms upon which he will snatch them from 



17 



the boiling abrgs. How eagerly lie explores the bindings 
of the James and Appomattox for the lost jewel, taking the 
risk of seeming nndigniiied rather than nnyieldino-. Willingly 
he holds the giiilty hand in his grasp if there is the slightest 
hope the dove may perch there. Thns, step by ste]), year by 
year, through trial, throngh contumely, ridicule, hati'ed, the 
scorn of a foreign and the target of a domestic foe, mi.-a})pre- 
hended even by friends, slowly, hopefully, certaiidy at last 
— the people see and the Morld acknowledges the great, good, 
peerless man that the convention of 1860 unM-ittiiigly stum- 
bled upon. The calumniator is silenced, the battle is linished, 
the smoke lifts, and there stands our giant friend on the far 
height of our triumph, holding in one hand a captured South, 
and in the other the redeemed bondmen. 

The grandest painting in all history, because proclaiming 
the grandest aim of all human eli'ort, to batfle crime, ^\hicli 
God abhors, and save freedom, which all men love. 

Those who threw shells at this life now go trembling with 
flowers to his grave, calling on this departed spirit, this abused 
saviour, this Illinois ape, this tyrant, this hyena, to plead, with 
that avenging "judgment," for this mercy their last great 
crime robbed, them of Who will say that the man who 
achieved these great results had not greatness in its best sense ? 
The moral greatness of fortitude and purity of character, the 
mental greatness of Avisdom to see farther, and ehxpience to 
express better the duties and the relations of the hour, than 
any citizen, officially or otherwise, which cotemporary America 
could furnish. Does nut this simplicity, this strengtli, this 
persevering earnestness, this hopeful, joyous, single-hearted- 
ness, this moral humility, this mental independence, this elo- 
quence, too busy with the heart and the salvation of the hour to 
be subtle, ornate or elaborate, this cordial familiar miracle of 
work and humor, of faith and fear, of anxiety and energy, 
this eccentric dispenser of a most eccentric era, who "\\ill say 
that, with all his errors, his defects of insight and culture, this 
man was not miraculously meant to meet the precise exigen- 
cies of our calamity ? Who will say that these high, broad 
American characteristics are not just the needs, with ;i little 



18 



more official experience, wliicli make up tlie great comprehen- 
Bive American necessities of our peculiar statesmanship 'I 

AbRx1iia]vi Lincoln came into tlie world during tlie early 
part of this century. The compeer of iS^apoleon in power, 
he is also his cotemporary in birth. Though the same waters 
washed the jurisdiction of botli, when born, how vast was the 
ditference in their stations. Louis Napoleon was the favorite 
nephew of the mightiest con(pieror of all ages. Born under 
the blaze of that eagle eye — announced to the world with glad 
salvos of artillery — rocked in the golden cradle of the lux- 
urious Tuilleries, lie knew nothing of the rude helplessness 
that struggled on the far frontier of unsettled America, amid 
rustic huts and howling wiklernesscs and Indian war whoops, 
whose cradle, if he had any, was rocked by the piercing blast 
that swept through the unslieltered domicile of an impover- 
ished home. Behold now that daAvning light beginning only 
with aninuil instincts and physical elements to aid its develop- 
ment. No gentle culture, no intellectual atmosphere, no chiv- 
alrous and traditional relinement to melt and mould its higlier 
sentiment and deeper cravings. All those rules by which 
great men are systematically trained, by which Cicero and 
Fenelon, Fox and Burke, and our Webster, and even Clay, 
were unf >lded and encouraged to advancing maturity, were 
denied him. Behold this granite will piercing these granite 
obstacles, through whose chinks gleam after gleam of helpful 
light is streaming until the stone crumbles, a broader flood de- 
scends, and the whole man, by self-culture and self-discipline, 
is lifted above the flatboat, above the rough right hand, into 
the higher brain, the loftier reach of legal knowledge, politi- 
cal power, and general usefulness. Slowly, step by step, he 
nears the far-olf prince, whose birth is so hopelessly above his 
own. The one becomes a needy adventurer, an exile ; the 
other is still an obscure attorney, but a man of local influence, 
who in dignity and self-respect would esteem himself equal to 
a seedy prince. Again they diverge far apart — convulsions 
shake the chronic storm-ridden home of the prince ; the out- 
law becomes France's necessity. The Bourbon's airy diadem 
vanishes — at his touch the uncle's imperial brilliant sparkles 



19 



on the dull brow that brooded for years over Its loss. Tlic 
prince is the great Emperor of France, and a law to Europe's 
crowned imbecility. The ol)scnre attorney grows apace. He 
has become the people's representative. Fortune, too, l>egins to 
light upon his lofty patience. By times the god descends, and 
the people in their princely capacity, passing by all the great 
lights who thought themselves born and reared, and who 
talked and twisted into all shapes, and bent their ears low and 
often to hear the sweet majestic sound that should call tliem 
to the Presidency, the people passing them all by, this humble, 
honest, direct, genuine man is dropped into that chair where 
Washington sat, and for wliicli Webster siglied. And now 
these rulers born at the extremes of society, in France and 
America, face each other as peers. The one lifted by cunning, 
by nerve, and the help of a great name, to wear through blood 
the imperial purple of a tickle people. The other with the 
nobler arts of a noble nature, by wise service, by the advocacy 
of liberal sentiments, l)y aljstinence from all sordid devices, 
comes up from the depths of the popular class to sway a vast 
empire, the equal of kings, with power and resources greater 
than France or England. Administering in peace the equal of 
several European kingdoms, and chastising with war a territ()ry 
commensurate with half a continent. It may be that a severe 
criticism would exact a more familiar intercourse with govern- 
mental action, a deeper and more comprehensive reach of 
intellectual culture in the administration of important politi- 
cal interests ; but when we consider the sagacity with whicli 
our great political and military struggle has been conducted, 
the easy grace with which intelligence by degrees counteracted 
inexperience, the vast amount of talent summoned to its assist- 
ance, the overflowing resources and the varied inqilements 
now awkwardly, now eifectively, adjusting themselves to meet 
and master the monster wrong ; the perfect simplicity, integ- 
rity and single-heartedness with which our lamented Presi- 
dent's intercourse with the people has been signalized ; how 
healthy his moral and personal tone has acted on the contest ; 
with what perfect confidence his faith inspired our confidence; 
how familiarly and fatherly he has come down from tlie stilted 



20 



formality of austere officiality to take our trouWes by tlie liand ; 
chucking tliem under the chin, and telling them to be of good 
clieer ; mollifying the dangerous with a]:)propriate and proper- 
turned touches of the humorous, using anecdotes as antidotes to 
keep human nature bland and cheerful under the constant pres- 
sure of the dreadful. This light-lieartedness was not the levity 
of a frivolous inditference to grave duties, but a buoyancy born 
of a sanguine and genial enthusiasm, confiding in the success 
of the true and the good, and looking hopefully and gladly to 
pleasant results, through a consciousness of meaning and 
acting always f )r tlie interest of all. 

Xo one sutfered more intensely in these hours of doul)t 
and gloom, when a triumph of the foe, on a battle field or at 
the ballot l)ox, seemed to throw a momentary despair over the 
results of tlie contest. Here was a quiet citizen, faithful to 
every civil emergency, whose pure and persevering life, gifted 
with a terse and peculiar eloquence, disposed hiui to advocate 
his political doctrines with quaint and emphatic earnestness ; 
this fresh and fearless man is suddenly called from an average 
routine of useful and responsil)le duties, to administer the 
complex machinery of the highest and most difficult trust of 
modern times. AVho will ever forget that awful fall of 1860, 
when, amid the golden l>eauty of autumnal foliage, and the 
still more golden splendor of national peace and national 
power, we harvested the dark N^ovember ballot. It fell, the 
last calm flow of a nation's will through bloodless channels. 
It fell, that ghastly Presidential sufirage, amid the secret 
shudderings of a forel)oding, yet still laithful, hopeful and 
peaceful Commonwealth. Bad men had promised to break up 
a good government if this good man succeeded to it. They 
had consented, voluntarily, to sit down and play the game, 
and when the Lixcoln ace turned up, attenq)ted, like reckless 
blacklegs, to overthrow the table, and in the confusion snatch 
the stakes and enjoy the plunder. 

Whence comes the philosophy of this dark suicide ? Surely 
first in egotism. A people who hold another race in absolute 
subjection soon exaggerate their self-importance and believe 
all races their inferior. Because they could flog one people -at 



21 



will, tliey tlionglit tliej liad only to tie tlie ISTortli up by tlie 
lieels and bring it to any terms. Xortheni Democrats could 
liave no feeling of patriotism for tlieir section when such august 
allies demanded submission. The next cause of tlieir ruin 
was ignorance. AVliere was tlieir arithmetic when South 
Carolina seceded ? Who told them that one was greater than 
two ; that the vast resources of the Xortli would tremble 
before a Palmetto leaf; that the mud-sills could drive a 
bargain, but not an enemy ; 1:lie shop-keeping crew might 
charge prices, but not batteries or bayonets ? Had they 
forgotten or never read Eevolutionary History ? Was not the 
deep love of country drank in with our mother's milk, now 
tenaciously upheld with the red flow of our ready blood ? 
Would the children of Warren and Putnam, of Schuyler and 
Greene, see this heritage swept away by the Davises and Lees 
of a more dastardly age ? 

Let those who are so proud of a separate South rememlier 
who gave them a South to be proud of. Who, when Marion 
was vanquished and Sumter and Lincoln swept from the 
contest, sent down our Greene and our hardy Xorthern help 
to lift tlieir chain and restore their freedom and their fellow- 
ship with States, never lur an hour knowing a country or a 
home distinct from the stronger and more protecting North. 
Thus they drifted on this frantic fraternity, with no light but 
phrensy and whisky, to their dark doom. 

Public opinion was confused and bewildered by the sense- 
less howl of State Sovereignty from this State bought for 
$17,500 by a company of English merchants. Look at the 
grievances alleged by the declaration of the South Carolina 
Convention. The Xorth had all the ships and commerce, 
that was the crime of competition committed by their hard 
hands and honest labor. The Xorth forced upon them a high 
tariff, and yet it was this South Carolina that insisted on a high 
tariff on cotton when we imported instead of exported that bel- 
ligerent little fabric. The South had to help pay the $200,000 a 
year for fishing bounties to our seamen who sailed with their cot- 
ton and defended it on the high seas, while the Xorth was ])ay- 
iii<r their o-reater share of the million and a half of dollars it cost 



22 



to cany the Soutliern mail, above its earnings. The Xorth, in 
one or two States, refused to execute the Fugitive Shive Law, 
tliat is those States chiinied the South Carolina privilege of 
nullifying an obnoxious Federal huv, which the Federal 
Government faithfully fulfilled. These were the senseless 
arguments why the government of our fathers sliould be 
destroyed, why the whole fabric of organized society should 
be startled and loosened, why the nation should shake with 
the tramp of hostile brothers, why graves should be opened, 
homes desolated and hearts Itroken. Why Abraham Lincoln, 
an angel in feeling, and a Democrat in action, should be 
called by the Southern press and the Southern rulers a tyrant, 
a baboon, an ape, a lord over hyenas, and the sure prey of 
those giant reformers who were so skillfully and sureh" tracking 
him to his lair. 

On the 4th of March, 1801, Abraham Lincoln swore to 
stand by the charter. lie walked from the ballot-box to the 
inaugural over broken oaths and dissolving States. Under a 
Scotch cap he drifted by a threatening mob to find himself 
in the presence of a confounded people and a paralyzed gov- 
ernment. Every aid was needed and no one could be trusted. 
Like the air, secession had insinuated itself into every crevice 
of public employment. Army and navy officers vrere resign- 
ing, and carrying off both experience and material. Clerks 
entrusted with the most important State secrets were sending 
them to the enemy, and if displaced the new might be equally 
as culpable. All enterprises were at a stand-still. Blood 
seemed the only business likely to thrive. EvTiy one looked 
to him who had been accused of all tin's to remedy all this. 
There he stood, calm and anxious. A quiet man, who had 
come to perform a plain task, to execute la^vs M'hich no one 
before had ever cpiestioned, to satisfy the voters who had sent 
him there, and then leave it all as sacredly and securely safe, 
the riglits of each and every secti(»n as he found them. Yet 
the storm howled on around this novice in statesmanship and 
in crime. More inroads on the holy temple, more whirling 
away of States, more faithful citizens renouncing their fidelit}- 
to a common mother. The contest deepens. Brothers are 



23 



sliarpening for tlieir brother's blood. Statesmen wlio could 
easily solve ordinary qnestiuns, shake their heads at the shak- 
ing- tabric. Pnblic sentiment is divided as to the powers of 
a government founded on sentiment. CAm you punish the 
autlior and the owner for what thev do with their own ? Has 
not a Sovereign a right to its sovereignty ? Thus was the 
nation bewildered, staggered, lowered, and drmdc with the 
sophistry of Southern phrases, until one day a lunatic in 
Montgomery telegraphed to another demented to tire on that 
sacred bunting. The ball comes on and knocks the iilm from 
our drowsy ISTorthern eyes, lifts the clouds that had obscured 
our self-defence, and we rise to the height of both our danger 
and our duty. Before Sumter all was party. Xot the nation, 
but how should the Republicans act. Would concessions be 
consistent with the rights and results of a party victory ? How 
dare defeat bully us. Sumter's ball hurled Abraham Likcoln 
from the Chicago Platform to 'the Springfield Armory. It 
made every American citizen an office seeker, asking a place 
for his country among the nations ; asking for his OM-n plun- 
dered citizenship ; every man was a government contractor 
that day, pleading for the Great Contract. jS^ow Abraham 
Lincoln is himself; now he puts on his oificial pea-jacket, 
goes on the national deck, and grasps the helm with that 
dauntless vigor which God and his Western life had given him. 
This bullet of Sumter relieves him of all that civil diffidence 
to which an nnpracticed prominence is prone and which even 
paralyzed the experience that preceded him. With more ne- 
cessity of blood comes more desertion of States. All who 
stand by the stability of national power need this crumbling 
away of the yielding, unreliable material which might impede 
or fraternize indifterently with the supreme exigency ; and 
now the question is, AVho shall awake and lead tlie military 
element. All our hope of glory and soldierly experience is 
centered in one tottering, fading, faithful giant. Scott of the 
past must be succeded l)y some younger Scott. With a child- 
ish enthusiasm the people adopt and exult over an unknown 
youth, modest and cultivated. With the generosity of unac- 
customed war they gorge this untried hero with ])owder, and 



24 



ball, and men, and conlidence, and every implement *:»f success, 
that could make merit succeed and tlie lack of it snarl and 
fall. 

Tlirougli all that period of criminal caution and incompe- 
tency, how nobly the faithful President stood by him whom 
an intelligent impatience was demanding to be removed. How 
anxiously his kind nature sustained this wooden hero, and 
urged him from splendid retreat to splendid retreat, to prove 
himself at last all this hopeful people hoped of him. With 
what eager pertinacity his disappointment turned from chief 
to chief, searching under every repulse for the true leader ; 
poring over that bloody volume of the AVar Directory to find 
the name and residence of him who was to lead this nation to 
■^-ictory and unity. 

During the first two years of the war, our greatest general 
was our general greatness. Alternately checked and chasing 
the elastic foe on innumeraljle battle-fields, yet still advancing, 
at last from fire- vomiting impediments, wide-spread toil and 
slaughter, are evolved in smoke and blood, as the genii Ity the 
sea rose out of storm and mist, so rose our Grant, Sherman 
and Farragut, to lead back through fields of ceaseless triumph 
the reeling, staggering spirit of Union and Liberty. These 
are the names that make our cause strong, and would make 
any cause dangerous. We know, too, whose clear eye first 
discovered their merits, and whose hand signed the instru- 
ments that sent them f )rth to hew away all obstacles that 
stopped E plurihus uiiunis ])ath from the Lakes to the Gulf. 

This unknown man, a stranger to office and statesmanship, 
to public praise or public blame, without great genius or great 
experience, or great fame, acquired or traditional, to gild error 
or confirm merit ; with a name to make, an oath to keep, a 
people to save, a crime to punish, the volcano heaving under 
his feet, the oath warning him over his head, the dagger at 
his breast, an empire in his hands, backed by a divided North, 
defied by a seemingly united South, his obscure and spotless 
name at once the synonym of England's sneer and Eichmond's 
curse ; with only a pure heart, a clear eye and a steady hand 
to lav without flinching on the most dangerous crisis, the 



'Jo 



most doubtful issues, the most perplexiug duties, tlie most 
dariug and defiant, the most well-bred, well-considered, com- 
prehensive, cultivated, hell-engendered plot that ever dashed its 
bloody hand and icy heart against the elements of law and 
order. lie found himself heir to a statesmanship confused, 
shuffling and pusillanimous, occupied only with the question 
as to how we should permit our institutions to l)e murdered 
most gracefully, and he left its public policy candid, earnest, 
self-sustaining, engaged only with the rpiestion how the 
attempted murderers could be treated most mercifully. He 
found xlmerican nationality suddenly confronting him as a 
disgraceful doubt ; he parted with it a terribly-respected tact. 
He found the government a dissohnng giant, dying of an old 
cancer that had baffled the l)est physicians ; he lived to cut 
out the poison with his sword, and find his well-knit, well- 
mannered, vigorous, compact patient a perpetual and healthful 
mourner at his grave. Sorely in need of force to meet the 
arming crime, he found our little na\y had been sent yachting 
in the Indian and Pacific Seas, that treason might cruise more 
seriously along the streams of our progress. He lived to till 
the world with our swarming ships, original in design, invin- 
cible in defense, terril jle in destruction, able to defend one con- 
tinent and defy another. He came into possession of 15,000 
regular soldiers, scattered over as many miles, and 1,000,000 
of men by him equipped reversed their arms on his funeral 
march. He found the people quailing under a del)t of eighty 
millions and fearing the weight of it must bar the door to 
national salvation ; he left them with their country redeemed, 
their resources more developed, their trade increased, and 
a mountain of three thousand millions of debt scaled at all 
points for investment, Avithout officially calling on a single 
foreign dollar to help us purchase our domestic safety. He 
found the public feeling and the sense of citizenship demoral- 
ized, the tone of political responsibility lowered, the suftVagc 
a mere vehicle for partisan aggrandizement, the love of country 
at the mercy of a States' right dogma, a party tie, a dema- 
gogue's breath ; national ol)ligati(»ns, confused and evaporating 
in a narrow local selfishness that would part with an empire 



26 



to save a liobby, tliat would not give up a prejudice to keep up 
the wisest and most beneficent systems ever sworn to by man. 
He lived to see the sun dawn on a nnited people purified by 
snffering ; their sense of danger elevating their sense of dnty 
and unity. By personal example of earnest, disinterested 
public service, by patience, courage and faith in all well- 
doing, more tlian by sermon, homily or proclamation, did this 
good chieftain mould the better life of the nation and preserve 
it from talse prophets and false issues ; keeping it in the steady 
line of calm and inflexil)le determination to pass through its 
perils, to accept its sacrifices, to live up to its duties, and so 
save all that licroism had acquired and freedom and virtue 
sanctified. He accomplished all this, not without, perhaps, 
many errors of inexperience and defects of judgment ; not 
without sometimes ringing the little bell a little too often, or 
drawing the bolt a little too soon ; sometimes overworking the 
war power, in which fewer mistakes could hardly have been 
made with so many crimes to lock up and use up ; the people 
preferring the occasional despotism of mistakes to the perma- 
nent despotism of crimes — preferring an incompetent man, 
sometimes inadvertently kept in oifice, to an absurd cause 
enthroned forever. He passed through this storm of war, 
this criticism of civil duty, these murmurs of complaint, these 
periods of panic, to victory and immortality, not without 
much help from heaven, many friends, Ijrilliant aids and im- 
mense resources, lie saw a foreign oligarchy envious and 
malignant, banded to write down and wear down the purest 
and most powerful type of modern repul)licanism ; he saw a 
home opposition, reckless, Avanton and depraved, showering his 
most righteous acts with defiant slanders and cruel perversions 
in a crisis entitled to magnanimity and a generous forbearance ; 
he saw this dastardly tril)e brought down, humbled and help- 
less, before the simple efforts of persistent and well-directed 
achievements ; lie saw the South that liad exhausted upon 
him every e}>ithet and every feeling of hatred and calumny, 
who had taught their slaves to ridicule him, their children to 
loathe and lisp the alphabet of never-ending sc()rn and bitter- 
ness, he saw this South sta2;gering and dvim; under his 



incessant Llows, lifting its faintlnf;: head to deny and to regret 
a death Avhieh might nncomtVirtablv precipitate them from the 
chastisement of principle to the chastisement of revenge. 

To all these merits of energy, patience, probity, sagacity, 
eloquence, and aptitude for organization and execution, which 
distinguished the great emancipator, must now he added the 
melancholy merit of national martyrdom. As in his life his 
achievements render his rule the most important and conspic- 
uous Presidential career since AVashington's, so in his death he 
stands alone as the first public character violently swept from 
the sphere of its usefulness ; a great guardian stricken down 
from the side of a great truth, just as it was passing from the 
perils of war to the exigencies of peace. AVill not emancipa- 
tion — this infant, born in the hail of blood-blinding war — will 
it not miss that relaxed hand, that stilled voice, as the or})han 
totters through opposing ranks to rank and power ( 

Abraham Lincoln fell on the very day the old flag came 
down on Sumter; when we stood on that ruin which was yet 
more the ruin of the South ; but not till his soul had gone up 
with the flag; not until the pertinacity of the North had 
waved a mended principle over a l)roken fortress. And now, 
with this loved one vanished, this Union saved, this sad 
Southern people prostrate, this peace ])erclied on every surly 
battlement of rebellion, Avill the South pass thus sullenly from 
the eminence of defiance to the extreme of apathy and indif- 
ference ^ 

AYliy is it that in all these conquered districts we hear so 
much of the people's love of the Union, and no attempt to 
work up this Union feeling into State organization and na- 
tional co-operation ? All ready to cringe to power, to forswear 
the past, ready to take rations, take oaths, take office, take 
anything to save property and avoid the last ditch. AVhere is 
all that manhood which braved death, defied the world, and 
staked everything for Jefi". ( That rebelled, robbed, lied, slaugh- 
tered, hung, and burned for the right to Ijreak up, and ^\i]l do 
nothing to make up, that involves reason, thought, loyalty, 
and earnest political brotherhood. 

Come back, oh deluded and defeated South. Con^e back 



28 



In feeling as yon are already back by compulsion. Those who 
won you with tlieir superior sword would hold you by the 
equal charter. For blows and curses, for hard names and light 
lingers, for ruin diverted from abroad and baffled at home, for 
all but the leadership in your hellish crimes, we offer just laws, 
equal rights, and a common share in tliat loving government 
only made more immortal by warding off the death-bloAV you 
would have dealt it. 

With all the desolatit ui of your fields and homes, you have 
lost nothing permanently but a traitorous crew and a poisonous 
creed ; nothing which industry will not repair and patriotism 
secure. Remembei*, slavery was never in danger until you 
lost your senses ; remember, too, tliat it never can be restored 
until we lose ours. The same talent and energy employed in 
the arts of peace that you have exhibited in war, the same 
toil with your white hands, the same endurance of fatigue and 
hardships, of hunger and danger, through desperate encounters 
and dreary marches which made you the slaves of slavery, by 
]3eaceful free labor, will restore you to a nobler and more 
abundant j^rosperity than was ever wrung from the toil 
of others. You can hire the negro's freedom cheaper than 
you can buy his servitude. The interest on his slave value 
will almost pay his free wages, while his own interest in the 
rights of men will increase the energy with which he develops 
your wealth. Free labor alone has conquered you. It in\^tes 
emigration, it develoj^s and then accumulates resources too 
vastly and too quickly for slavery to compete with. The 
negro, as slave, failed to keep off" war or to keep up war for 
your advantage, now try if the negro as freeman, may not 
prolong peace and so insure harmony, unity, and a less sensi- 
tive fV>rni of progress and prosperity. Will you forget that 
you must arouse, organize, and recover your lost civil status ? 
As war has thrashed out of you the beaten and demolished 
theory that a State may defy and destroy a nation, why not 
heartily and permanently shape the State law and conform 
every local obligation and every moral and political sentiment 
to the spirit of national duty ; co-operating in cheerful concur- 
rence with the great Federal amendment, so that never directly 



29 



or 1)}- implication shall any clause be so doubtful in tlie cousti- 
tution as to tempt the traitor or wean the patriot from fealty 
to the supreme law of the Union, and thus divert misery and 
ruin from yourself and your children to the latest generation. 
AYill not this Southern people call conventions, appoint 
elections, send delegates back voluntarily to that Congress they 
voluntarily spurned, and thus, in the good American way, by 
argument, by peaceful investigation and hopeful reference to 
representative and judicial adjudication, submit their rights 
and wants, under a returning submission and sense of duty, to 
those who in their better days decided wisely and well for us 
all; or else, in stul)bornness and anger, remain under this 
military post-garrison form of pupilage, or go forth wanderers 
to people some more S()Utliern solitude ; or, like the Arab or 
the gipsy, intrude on luckier races branded with tlie marks of 
unrespected martyrdom. Laws, habits, language, feeling, kin- 
red, make us one people. Love and trade, as well as moun- 
tains and rivers, matrimony, as well as geograpliy, have 
made us one people. You cannot form two nations of a com- 
munity with a Yankee aunt and grandmotiier hanging up rer- 
erently in every Southern parlor, with a Southern sister or 
grandfather piously packed aAvay in every Xorthern home. 
Is the Southern pride wounded by defeat ? The very exer- 
tions that have been vanquished have made them famous, aud 
by the industry of the effort prepared them for that free lab<:»r 
which they could not avoid. If they have lost their slaves 
they have gained themselves — gained knowledge, gained self- 
reliance, and a surer and cpiicker development. Admitting 
that tlie whole value of the slaves was one thousand millions 
of dollars, which they have lost, yet it is not one-half the sum 
the JN'orth has had to pay to nuiintain the Government. Are 
they desolate and impoverished i Kot more so than any des- 
perate speculator who eml)arks his all in some such wild-cat 
bank and fails. If they ?/v7/ invest in damnation, they must 
expect their profits to be hell. If the negro proves himself 
worthy of free labor it will ensure to Southern ambition more 
political power by enlarging the Southern constituency ; it will 
make Southern lands more valuable by increasing their })ro- 



30 



ductiveiiess ; and with the generous tender of Northern cap- 
ital, this Southern coniniunity must rapidly recover from its 
depletion. 

And now, soldiers ! sons of our Xorth ! saviours of oar na- 
tion ! your days of danger and strife are drawing to a close. 
jS^o heroes of the world tread more enviable heights of fame. 
Your bayonets have been gleaming spires over that holy 
church of libcrt}' in which your fathers and your brothers 
worshipped. 

Through all your marches you have never forgotten that 
you were citizens as well as soldiers; that you were moving at 
no unrighteous conqueror's beck. Amid all the storm of 
battle, on picket, through the drill, or by the camp lire, the 
spirit of your Government was simply calling upon you to 
perfect yoin- <jwn citizenship. No cannon could drown that 
vc>ice — no raid capture the resolution to obey it. 

The glory of your deeds will remain with you through life ; 
it will influence your character and insure you respect. The 
sight of that old flag when it flits between your cares and your 
dreams and waves over some civil duty abandoned on holidays 
or festivals, you ^\ill think h(»\v you iVdlowed it as it sti'eamed on 
fields of fire. How the nation reeled or righted as you shrunk 
from or Ijreasted the guilty lines that confronted it. 

And as your eyes gleam with exultation over the dangers 
you escaped, and the rights you snatched from the traitors' 
grasp, you will mingle your glad refrain with loved memories 
of that great and good chief who first called you into service, 
equipped you for battle, and with a father's care and a mon- 
arch's power, followed you with cheering words through every 
contest, until the bullet that spared you laid low his life, fresh 
from the freedom of one race and the safety of another. 






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